1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to containers for tennis balls and, more particularly, to a tennis ball container with a body designed to easily load and reliably contain tennis balls, and a folding handle designed to form a variety of shapes, thus being more conveniently usable while carrying the container or practicing tennis, in addition to being easily stored within a limited space when the container is not used.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Tennis ball containers are used for containing a plurality of tennis balls to allow a user to conveniently pick up the balls while practicing tennis. That is, it is desirable for a user, practicing tennis, to continuously hit a plurality of balls without repeated pauses for gathering or picking up the balls from the ground, and so the balls are required to be contained in a container to allow the user to conveniently use the balls.
Such ball containers may be usable independently or set in a tennis-practicing machine to form a ball container part of the machine.
The tennis ball containers are necessarily designed to easily load and reliably contain tennis balls, in addition to allowing users to conveniently pick up the balls from the containers while practicing tennis. When the structure of the ball containers is designed to be usable for a variety of applications as desired, the operational function of the containers will be enhanced.
In the prior art, a tennis ball container having a body fabricated using a plurality of barrier rods has been proposed and used. This ball container has a rectangular basket structure, with barriers forming the upper, left, right and bottom walls of the structure, and may be usable independently or set in a tennis-practicing machine to form a ball container part of the machine.
When the conventional ball container is used independently without being set in a tennis-practicing machine, it is necessary for a user to feed balls into the container one by one, and so the container is inconvenient to the user. When the ball container is used as a part of a tennis-practicing machine, it is necessary to design the structure of the container to precisely agree with the machine. It is therefore impossible to change the shape of the container.
Therefore, a tennis ball container having a structure capable of being usable independently or as a part of a tennis-practicing machine has been required in the prior art.
In addition, it is preferred to design the tennis ball container such that the top opening of the container is positioned at a height allowing a user""s hand to reach the interior of the container and pick up a ball without forcing the user to inconveniently bend his body while practicing tennis on the court.
Accordingly, the present invention has been made keeping in mind the above problems occurring in the prior art, and an object of the present invention is to provide a tennis ball container, in which the bottom and sidewalls of the barrier body are partially fabricated using a plurality of elastic barrier rods, with the intervals between the elastic barrier rods being elastically enlargeable to allow tennis balls to be loaded into the barrier body through the bottom of the body.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a tennis ball container, of which the handle is foldable upward and downward to be selectively usable as a handle or support legs for the barrier body, the handle thus selectively holding the barrier body at a height above the ground when it is in a fully downward folded position to allow a user""s hand to reach the interior of the body and easily pick up a ball without excessively bending his body.
A further object of the present invention is to provide a tennis ball container, of which the handle consists of first and second handle rods having a folding structure, thus being overlapped together and fully laid on the top of the barrier body to form a compact volume of the container when it is desired to store the container within a limited space.
Still another object of the present invention is to provide a tennis ball container, which uses a hinge bracket designed to have a rounded edge allowing a user to easily fold the handle by simply compressing and rotating the handle relative to the bracket with less power.
In order to accomplish the above object, the present invention provides a tennis ball container, comprising: a top barrier rod bent to form a closed rectangular profile, the top barrier rod forming a top structure of a barrier body of the container; a bottom barrier rod bent to form a closed rectangular profile, the bottom barrier rod forming a bottom structure of the barrier body; a plurality of side barrier rods extending in a vertical direction between the top and bottom barrier rods to connect the top and bottom barrier rods into a single structure, and form two inclined opposite sidewalls of the barrier body; a plurality of elastic barrier rods vertically arranged inside the side barrier rods while being mounted to the top barrier rod at their top ends such that the elastic barrier rods are elastically displaceable in opposite directions at their bottom portions; two first handle rods rotatably attached to the side barrier rods at the opposite sidewalls of the barrier body, each of the first handle rods including a U-shaped rod part, with opposite ends of the U-shaped rod part bent inwardly to form two stop ends, and a linear rod part integrated with the two stop ends at its opposite ends; a second handle rod having hinge shafts at its opposite ends, and hinged to the stop ends of each of the first handle rods at the hinge shafts; two hinge brackets mounted to each of the first handle rods at positions around the stop ends to form hinged joints of the second handle rod, and allowing the second handle rod to be rotatable relative to the first handle rod while being elastically compressed.
Each of the hinge brackets surrounds the first handle rod at a position inside each stop end, the hinge bracket also having both a rod holding slit for holding the second handle rod, and a rounded edge for guiding an elastic folding action of the second handle rod relative to the first handle rod.
The two hinge brackets may be mounted to each of the first handle rods such that the rounded edges of the hinge brackets face each other or are opposite to each other.
The tennis ball container also comprises two spacer rods, each of the spacer rods having a plurality of rounded spacer portions, and mounted to the bottom barrier rod at two side surfaces of the barrier body around the bottom portions of the elastic barrier rods.